There’s no doubt that online communication has changed the way we work with each other. Between an increase in remote and hybrid working options and growing opportunities to collaborate with colleagues around the world, many more of our interactions take place behind screens. With that in mind, it’s become all the more important to understand how we present ourselves on video calls and through text, as details we might not even consider can impact others’ professional impressions of us.
In her recently published paper, “A Review of Virtual Impression Management Behaviors and Outcomes,” Kogod professor of management Hayley Blunden explores the existing research on these online impressions and offers suggestions for people hoping to be mindful of how they come across in video conferencing, emails, and messages. Typos in emails, the choice of Zoom background for an interview, and knowing where to look during a call are just a few details that can all make a difference at a crucial moment. We spoke with Professor Blunden about her findings, what they mean, and what the future of online collaboration might look like.
Hayley Blunden: I have long been interested in how interacting virtually influences how we relate to one another, especially within a workplace context. Before pursuing an academic career, I worked in the private sector, where I observed the power of workplace relationships in driving results. These relationships are essentially the sum of a series of interactions.
Increasingly, our interactions with others occur virtually—not in person or face to face—whether we’re introducing ourselves in an email or engaging in a video interview. The growing importance of our virtual connections has motivated this line of research. In particular, my co-author Andrew Brodsky and I wanted to understand what is and is not currently known about how virtual interactions influence others’ impressions of us. Research on virtual interaction at work has been quite diverse thus far, stemming from multiple research traditions.
Research on virtual interaction is spread across a wide variety of fields; work on the topic is published not only in business journals but also in technology, communications, and even medical journals. Although it was a challenge to try and bring together work from all of these disparate fields, this dispersion was also one of the reasons my coauthor and I wanted to undertake this work. We wanted to understand the body of extant research on how we make impressions virtually and bring them together in one place. We identified and refined this research via an iterative database search in which we leveraged the results of each search to identify new keywords.
One big takeaway from this work is that virtual interaction is really quite rich in driving others’ impressions of us.